skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[please refute, not just downvote] Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done (maybe it should be done, but for some other reason).

I'm suggesting that barriers to modifying systems have had an accidental benefit of favouring standardization.

The basic problem is that it's hard to create systems (APIs, generalization, documentation, test-cases, integration with everything else). Brooks claims it's 9 times as much effort as making something that "works for me". If you can't amortise that over many users, it's usually not worth doing the job properly.

But if it's just for you, you don't need all that polish, right? Well, no. If you are standing on the shoulders of giants, it's really helpful if those giants are stable, function as you expect, interact correctly with other tools, and have clear documentation for when you've forgotten the details (writing it yourself doesn't make your memory perfect). SOTSOG is really important for building complex systems, because it enables you to push down details to a lower level of abstraction, so you have less clutter to deal with. It's getting the abstractions right that is so difficult (we've all seen it done wrong).

There are huge advantages to using standardized systems, that have been improved, tested, documented etc by others. If you want to do something different, it's very helpful if you can start with standardized components around the new part, so you can just concentrate on the interesting stuff, and not need to build the whole world from scratch. Of course, the existing stuff is not perfect - the question is whether it's worth it for you to spend the time needed to make something better.

Some issues in assessing this argument: These are ideas have been around for a long time, but haven't taken off. Highly modifiable systems like lisp, despite having clever and devoted users, lack the standardized libraries of less flexible languages like Java.

But there is one kind of area where such systems are absolutely brilliant - exploration at the systems level. Many (most?) programming language ideas have been developed in lisp, even though did not become popular in that form, because lisp is great for language exploration, but not for standardization. Similarly, an OS that can be modified on the fly, is great for exploring OS ideas. You can iterate quickly, see the results and so on.

Of course, it seems possible that one could have it both ways - a highly flexible system that also had standardized components. But that doesn't seem to happen. Flexibility and standardization are natural enemies, both in differences in the tools that support them... and the kinds of people who use those tools.

BTW: There's a middle way. Create tools that can be standardized on. i.e. libraries, frameworks, engines, DSLs. Light table could be perfect for that... but people who use it may want to make tools that are just as flexible as light table, and so don't support standardization.
What's the reasoning for why RSA/DSA with a sufficient key length would be vulnerable sooner than elliptic curve?
> JavaFX is now a very serious option for client development

I wouldn't be surprised if Oracle killed JavaFX next year. I can't think of any serious project that would rely on it. Requiring users to download whole Java JRE is not a viable option any more.
OSCON 2012: Danny Hillis, "The Learning Map"
Well the original Rails book had it:

http://pragprog.com/book/rails4/agile-web-development-with-r...
Power to the worms. ;)
Farming is undergoing a similar talent crunch right now. If you are in the right parts of the world and have a little skill behind your name, you can easily make $50/hr as a farmhand.

Food and tech is where investors are piling all their money right now. As both a software developer and farmer, I do fear what will happen when investments start going elsewhere.
It would be interesting to know if they earn more money on subscriptions or on ads. If it is the former, then why not cut all free plans and leave only the subscriptions?

If I understood correctly, they pay a fee to the records company each time someone plays a song. Even if they're making half their revenue on the free plan, cutting royalties by something like 95% (just guessing) and losing 50% of the revenue doesn't seem like a bad idea... Of course they lose on advertising, but is there something else I'm missing?
4. Choose a different platform.
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusive... I collect records and digital files, but when I'm away from my collection - whether it be at work, on the go, in the car - I've been making use of Spotify.

The library is really good, and the app itself is quite nice. It has this amazing thing called QUEUING (iTunes - I'm looking at you) and the social aspect of it is actually pretty useful. You can search playlists for anything from "Jazz for dummies" to "Breaking Bad soundtrack" and sure enough, somebody will have gone through the trouble of assembling a really high quality mix from the Spotify library.

So no, Spotify obviously isn't going to give you the same feeling as physically collecting music releases. It doesn't try to.

I will add that I do have a few negatives surrounding Spotify. I think it is a pretty poor music discoverability tool (outside of searching for social playlists to subscribe to). The radio is very poor, and some of the tagging/cataloguing of their vast collection leaves a bit to be desired.
Group Buying Long Island Estate for Tesla Memorial
What is NASA doing with Big Data today?
Their goal is to stripmine music startups as a revenue strategy. They'd rather have the companies there as an alternative to piracy, but they don't want them to have any power at all, so they string them along and siphon as much investment as they can.
Vision, Winning and Persistence with Taylor Umphreys, Founder/CEO of brightblu.
Yeah, it is more like 1 file in a 100 billion gets lost.
I am "the 1%"? Not nearly, if you mean "THE 1%," which starts at around $350k per year.

If you just mean the top 1% of developers? Well, maybe I AM in the top 1% of developers, though I don't know how anyone could measure that. But the point is I got here through passion. And the point of my reply is that passion IS relevant to this discussion.

And that it's only not relevant to people who don't experience it with regard to programming. Honestly, I don't know if someone who doesn't experience passion can CHANGE that; you're passionate about what you're passionate about, and telling yourself to obsess about something seems like it just wouldn't work.

So don't take this as any kind of criticism; I'm not saying you're Doing It Wrong. Just that passion DOES make a difference; when you have it, you have no reason to listen to people who tell you that you'll be irrelevant and no one will hire you when you're 45, because you'll be keeping yourself relevant out of habit. Just don't claim that it's not relevant in general, because it is. Climbing to the top of ANY profession or other endeavor really requires it; the most obvious example being Olympic athletes, who typically don't start out at the top of their sport, but achieve the top by being more passionate (and therefore obsessive) about practicing.

It makes me want more terms for "programmer" or "developer" (and not including "rock star", which has connotations that annoy people). There's such a range of skill encompassed by those terms that they're practically useless, and they spawn debates like the above where people have 15 different ideas what a "programmer" is (in yours, I'm in the top 1%, and in mine, I hang out with "typical" developers, and yet a lot of people I know work on interesting projects with an option to contract). Heck, pretty much everyone at Google is in a similar situation, in that they can (typically) switch projects easily if they get bored. And there are far too many developers at Google for all of them to be in the top 1%, I think.
We just did it without too much of a problem. The biggest problems were in the razor syntax
This may be a funny comment to find on HN, but even as a reasonbly technical person I really don't want to spend the time to find mods, research what my hypothetical Android phone is capable of running etc.

Especially because I depend on it to occasionally take a call and whatnot--I don't want to worry about whether some program or software update is going to screw it up. I worry enough about this stuff at work.

Nexus sort of solves this problem, but I hope that Google will do an even better job as Apple has now that they own Motorola.
I think timescale may be applicable here. Some key programs for large companies will spend several million a year for several years - particularly if you are taking your Mainframe applications and trying to restructure them to have more easily changed business rules and a new infrastructure.

That said, I also suspect he may have been exaggerating for effect :-)
Excellent podcast on the ethics of automated systems deployed by military, LEOs, etc. featuring Noel Sharkey:

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/print/6600

From the teaser:

"Noel Sharkey is Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science, and lectures extensively across academic disciplines, including engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. In addition to having published well over a hundred academic articles and books, Sharkey has worked closely with policy makers and the military to create awareness about the limitations of AI and the dangers of automated warfare."
Hence my scare-quotes ;)
Fair enough. That's not what I took from the comment though.
Now Azure just needs to hurry up and release .Net 4.5 on their servers. Until then no MVC4 ,WebAPI, or Entity Framework 5.

Scroll down to New Features for a list of changes: http://www.asp.net/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes
> drawing attention to what IE can do rather than what it cannot

Spot on. Specifically... WebGL.
SHA-3 extensions for Ruby and Node.js
Microsoft and Apple both have multi-billion dollar projects.

Edit: Google and Amazon likely don't, actually.
> It's about the lag between the moment you think about what you want to write and the moment when it's written.

I think this is it exactly. In particular, when people start trying to incorporate typing speed into their arguments, it's a sign that they really don't understand where the bottlenecks are.
Hacking for the Sake of Hacking
Model Based UI Testing using DGML in Visual Studio
if you were just 'putting them together' you'd be done. as much as I'm a bootstrap fan, this is not the use case for it - redesigning the look/feel of every element? you'd be better off not using any framework and building from scratch if you're not getting any value from the defaults of a framework, and instead insist on overriding/modifying everything a framework gives you.

You probably already know this, just thought I'd share your vent.
This is such a poor choice for an article. It's not even like an A/B test - not even remotely - yet the author portrays it as such. This is really more like "Here's how an article converted that I posted in July on subject 'A' and title 'A' with no call to actions, and here's another article that I posted almost four months later about subject 'B' with title 'B' that had call to actions in it." There's just no meat here - were they both posted on the same day of the week? Were they both posted on/about the same time? Were "world events" about the same when you posted each (or was one overshadowed by a major event that people were focusing on)? I could go on and on... Anyone who draws conclusions from this article is walking a fine line. It leaves you with more questions than answers (and they are "big" questions that invalidate the article's whole point).

I see it as just asinine link bait junk and I'm disappointed to see it get so many upvotes.
shorter release cycle doesn't have to be hectic; what makes it hectic is unreasonable number of features which is poor planing. You will end up coding 24/7 in cycle of any length if workload to deliver all in given time frame is greater than what you can deliver working only regular hours. That is poor planing regardless of sector and length of release cycle
Engine in development could cut Mars travel time to three months
Probably some medium-sized SAP implementation.
They provide value to the owners of the roads from which customers are towed - roads typically owned by the public. Your analogy is folly.
I just have to ask, where do I contact these companies in China looking for US programmers, and is Mandarin a requirement? This sounds a bit like the offers to make a good living teaching English overseas, where the reality is a bit different.
If it weren't for iOS and the App Store I would have went to University

I wouldn't write off things like that. Maybe you could have discovered something totally tangential but equally worthwhile somewhere else.
Do Google and Typekit fonts really not work on the Kindle Fire?
I'm being constructive to zacharyvoase. You can't please everybody with every statement you make without being a sycophant.
Hopefully it works better than their legal team. /s
I think he means little or no formal education required; i.e. something the self taught can get into based on merit alone. You can't do that with a lot of high paying professions as they absolutely require formal education.
Its more of a business decision me thinks. A lot will not buy the latest phone Model if they could update the software on their 2 year old phone that would give them all the features
So, Samsung will be able to sell fewer Galaxy 3 if a user could update the Galaxy 2. (Even if the new OS version is slow on an older hardware).
Searching/trawling, not trolling.

Still corrupt, as success is measured by "increased prosecution", not "decreased piracy", which means they have just incentivized an entrapment+framing program. SL PD could make a fortune by pirating IP and arresting some of their customers.
I'm curious, is there something specific in MVC4 that you need? Personally, I just want it for WebAPI.
Disagree that the price is too low. I think its sitting right at the top of what most are willing to pay.

I think of it like this: for 10 bucks a month, every month I have Spotify, I could have owned an album on one of my playlists. After 2-3 years, I basically own nothing, when I could have owned most of the music I listen to. Most of the people I've introduced Spotify to are on a similar wavelength.

On top of that, the idea that Spotify may not be around in a year or two add's even more hesitance on my part to keep the $10 subscription.

I really hope it all works out for them (and us).
Right. We're still waiting for an answer to why he published his critic's email address.
Get rewarded for getting healthy with a new crop of incentivized apps
Combination of tool and troll?
Wow: open door to unlock. I can see some problems (e.g. you want to check it's locked; someone breaks in while you are standing near-enough to the car), but this seems a powerful approach.

Google search is an e.g.: almost no UI, improves over time, adapts to you.
... and hash to jump backwards to previous occurrence of current word.
Indeed, that would have a lot more teeth than FTC complaints and threats to boycott.
I can't figure out why MVC and WebAPI are separate products.
AWS free tier has always been designed as a "temprary free sample" not as a "free for small users" like AppEngine.
No, the original Nexus will no recieve JB officially.... The 3GS which is just as old still got IOS6.
https://www.spotify.com/us/signup/plain/
The WebAPI project has an interesting history. It was owned originally by the WCF team and then was taken over by the ASP team. A lot of the supporting code for it comes from a new Namespace too. That makes some things slightly annoying when hosting an API in your MVC application.
Go with any Google phone, they're developer friendly, support jailbreaking without doing anything crazy, has good upgrade path, and supported by 3rd party mods like cyanogenmod. All the other phones are basically crap -- you'll get one upgrade option if you're lucky, and it probably won't get 3rd party mod support. My Nexus S can get up to jellybean even though it started from gingerbread. I suspect the future Google phones would have a similar level support.

I also owned the nexus one, but sad that it wouldn't go past gingerbread.
But that way of saying wasn't usually diplomatic. The whole thing sounds cheerfully implausible to me.
I bought the Atrix, one of these phones. Worst device I ever bought. To think the iPhone 4 was the exact same price but such a bigger value makes it hard for me to want to go Android again.
Mini book review: On the off chance you're planning on implementing a stack machine, you must read this book. A few years ago I was working on a stack machine, and I didn't know what to read because virtually all of the references for fundamental material are decades old. Let me save you the trouble and tell you this is the one you want. There are newer papers you should read, of course, but if you're only going to read one thing, it should be this.

Why would you want a stack machine in this day and age? They're small. Really, really, small. The stack processor we made was so small that it fit in an empty space in the floorplan of our "real" (x86) processor.
Demo (http://demo-plus.amon.cx/) seems to be down.
No refunds?! What would Joel say?
I've been playing around with some Greenarray[1] chips lately, and I have to admit that the core ideas are fascinating. Their particular variant of Forth is actually almost pleasant to use--certainly better than MIPS, which is my closest point of reference. (Ignoring crazy things like the color of identifiers controlling your program's semantics.) The chips are also extremely power efficient.

[1]: http://www.greenarraychips.com/

I've found having a mental model of a stack-based system far easier than even a simple register-based one. However, this might also be true because the Greenarray chips themselves are far simpler than any other CPU I've ever looked at.

And, of course, the fact that you have 144 cores on a tiny chip despite a cheap manufacturing process is also very neat.
Mind explaining your issue with single packet auth? Port knocking by definition is an extra layer of security through obscurity, in that gaining access requiring hitting the sequence of ports to "knock". Depending on the implementation, this either is very vulnerable to MITM/sniffing attacks (static knock sequence) or quickly gets really complicated (fully dynamic knock sequence).

SPA, by contrast, uses actual crypto to securely authenticate the user with the server. I'm a fan of fwknop, which uses GPG to sign a request packet which is read and understood by the server. It protects against 0 day attacks on OpenSSH, lets me drop 22 inbound to eliminate all those pesky attackers, and allows me to securely authenticate with the fwknopd.
Could be http server access logs but if I made glaring mistakes like that I surely would not trust my own server logs anymore.
Interestingly, you're talking about an energy alternative to solar. Do you have an example of one of those?

(My understanding is that solar is the alternative to things like coal)
All they have to do is decide to become a real game company and they have a shot at a turnaround. They've got the money, people, and resources to do it. What they (probably) lack is the conviction it would take to focus on the long-term. It'd involve firing most of their staff and massively scaling back the entire company for the foreseeable future.
How does it compares to something like New Relic?
Well, it took me 15 minutes to figure out the cause of 404 error.

If you DON'T have index.html in your root folder it will return this error, python's SimpleHTTPServer module does much better job and gives you list of your folders.
nope, did he form the same opinion as mine?
I gave Diaspora advice on fixing the vulnerabilities then a week to do it prior to mentioning anything more specific than "There exist multiple very bad bugs here."
Programmer talent is sparse worldwide

And yet, when I look around at the job postings in Canada, a job with requirements that go on endlessly tops out at about $80,000/year. Expect less if you are an average programmer. Such a low income, relative to what US-based companies are offering, doesn't really speak to a shortage in my mind.

I admit, there could be some kind of survivorship bias here: I'm only seeing the lower-paying jobs because the good jobs are less likely to be hanging around on the job boards. But then if an $80,000/yr. job is failing to attract talent, should it even be considered a real position with respect to shortage counting? I could hire dozens of programmers if they would only do it for $10/hr., but I don't think it is fair to count those as unfilled positions or a shortage surrounding that. Nobody with talent is ever going to do it for that kind of pay.
The best part of this whole catastrophe is that this app isn't just embarrassing for smeagol, but it is playing out HN, YC's main advertising venue, and it undermines the whole concept of these MVP summer vacation startup companies, showing that 2 guys a garage can't launch a minimally provisioned website.
"Soni admitted that the company wasn't quite there yet. But he believes the decision to cut off some upgrades would position the company to meet its future commitments." Bad business practice. Keep this up and you won't have any customers who would want to touch your "future" products. People are not that dumb. Some actually do research on a company's reputation before buying their products and others, well......they just don't forget when they were screwed over.
I think you misspelled www.iceboxamateur.com then?
And even when it's fixed after the way they responded, don't trust them with your data or anything at all.
It is about time that this sexual discrimination is ended
They're not really. WebAPI is built on top of MVC, but uses some different base classes (which is annoying as hell at times). [Edit] Plus what vyrotek said [/Edit]

I think it has more to do with getting uptake among the WCF crowd than anything else. IF MS doesn't specifically call it out the folks that had bought into the kool-aid to use WCF for all services probably would never see it. As it is, only 50% of them will see it.

The MS stack has a LOT of 80% developers who are buried in the bowels of some organization happily doing the same thing they've been doing since they first learned .NET.

Heck, I had a call from an organization the other day looking for a senior developer, but they had to have intimate knowledge of a perticular third parties UI control library, because that was what they were using when they wrote the original application in VB6. Couldn't convince them that they probably don't need the 3rd party controls for an HTML app, not could I convince them that any senior developer worth hiring would be able to understand and use said library in a matter of hours if they were truly needed.

Over the last three years I've come to understand that it's I'm not that I'm awesome, it's that most developers are just bad at their jobs (present company probably excluded).
I had some pretty bad RSI where I had to take a couple of months off so I don't think the risk is nothing.
Uh, nice. What was the result of the Turk people?